From: www.itworld.com

Bob Young on Red Hat's origins

by Joe Barr

March 20, 2001 —

 


LinuxWorld.com recently caught up with Red Hat Chairman Bob Young. After a missed connection or two, Young began the interview by recounting the good old days when Red Hat Software was just getting started. Read more to learn how he and Marc Ewing first got together, and the changes they made to the original Red Hat distribution that have made it number one today.



Young began by going back to Red Hat's misty origins:


Red Hat got started, well, legally, we got started in March of '93, when I quit my day job and went to work in my wife's sewing closet trying to make a living. And I was doing a bunch of things at that time, but one of them was selling free software. I was publishing a newsletter called New York Unix.



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His mention of the newsletter reminded me of his involvement with Linux Journal as it got started. I interrupted his tale of Red Hat's beginnings to ask about that, and he provided a detailed account of how he and Phil Hughes got together, started Linux Journal, and then split up again, with Young happily leaving the publishing business to Hughes. Young credited Hughes and Linux Journal with giving "the whole Linux and open source movement real credibility in the early days." He then returned to my original question.


In the meantime of course, coming back to the answer to your question, this was now, golly, March of '94, and I'm going, "OK, what assets do I own?" And I basically owned a couple of mailing lists for New York Unix and Linux Journal. And so I started using those mailing lists to promote the ACC PC Unix and Linux Catalog.



I was selling Linux at that time, Yggdrasil and InfoMagic (and Slackware Pro came out shortly after that) for anywhere from between twenty and fifty bucks, and you made fifty percent margins on it -- whereas selling subscriptions you sold for twenty-four bucks you made ten percent margins on it. So I really liked the idea of getting out of the publishing business and into the catalog business.



So in the summer of '94, as my sales of all this open source software started to ramp up very rapidly, I realized the problem was that I was going to find this stuff in CompUSA soon enough. And I didn't have the resources to compete with CompUSA. So I wanted to have some products that I could brand, so that when Linux ended up in CompUSA, I could treat CompUSA as a customer, not a competitor.


Young then described how a number of his customers mentioned the name of Marc Ewing, who they said was producing an interesting Linux distribution called Red Hat. They said enough good things about Ewing that Young decided to get in contact with him. Ewing was already at work on the package management system that would later become the Red Hat Package Manager, RPM.


In the fall of '94 ... my customers are telling me that Marc is really going in a better direction. And I say [to Ewing], "You know, I am selling a thousand copies of month of a combination of InfoMagic, Slackware Pro, Slackware, and Yggdrasil. So I should be able to switch -- sell, say, 10 percent of my customers -- over to this new Red Hat stuff. So, Marc, send me 90 days supply. Send me 300 copies."



I get dead silence at the end of the phone. Finally, I get from Marc that he was only thinking of manufacturing 300 copies. I knew how much I was paying for the 300 copies that I was buying, so I said [to myself], "This kid is starving to death." And so, very quickly, quickly, we immediately opened up the conversation more broadly as a result of that, and realized that we had a match made in heaven.



He needed some finance and marketing help, and I needed a product that I could brand as my own. We went back and forth in our discussions, but in January '95, we ended up merging our efforts. I bought the copyright, the brand, the trademarks, not that he had copyrighted or trademarked anything, the implicit copyrights that he owned, in return for shares in ACC Corp. Then ACC Corp, the company I had formed in March of 1993 to get into the publishing business, changed its name to Red Hat Software, Inc.



So somewhere between my first conversation with Marc in September of '94, and January of '95 ... Red Hat Software, Inc. was born. Prior to that, Marc had been running it as a sole proprietorship.



We were pretty big, even though we were tiny. None of us were very big at that time. At that time Slackware had, as near as I could tell, 90 percent of the market. Yggdrasil had maybe five percent left over from previous efforts, and SuSE was already going in Germany and doing a reasonably good job in Germany.


Young had learned from his sales of other distributions that users wanted fresh code. Slackware had 90 percent of the market because users could download the very latest version via FTP. CD-based distributions, like the original versions of Red Hat and Yggdrasil, were six months out of date by the time the CD got into the customers' hands. Young concluded that "if we were really going to grow the Linux market, we had to give the users what they needed, the things they couldn't get from the proprietary software vendors. And so the first engineering job that Marc took on was to re-engineer Red Hat so that it was easily FTP-able."



Given that improvement in distribution, and the completion of RPM as a result of a joint effort with Caldera, Red Hat was off and running on the path to becoming the most popular distribution of Linux in the world. Next week, we'll conclude this interview as Young speaks on criticisms of Red Hat, his role in the company today, and its future.

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